The oil and natural gas industry includes a wide range of operations and equipment which includes the wells themselves, but also natural gas gathering lines, processing facilities, storage tanks, and transmission and distribution pipelines.
The industry is the largest source of emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone and smog, both of which are linked to negative health effects, along with methane, benzene, ethyl benzene, and n-hexane. These greenhouse gases are disfavored by regulatory agencies for a number of reasons, not the least of these that they are suspected of causing serious negative health effects.
At one time, the oil and gas industry treated the elimination of gas as a non-issue, simply allowing gases to be expelled into the surrounding environment when they were not valuable enough to eagerly collect, or alternatively, to simply burn the gases.
However, times have changed and the regulatory scheme that controls drilling demands tight governance over escaping greenhouse gases. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has addressed these gas emissions by slowly becoming more aggressive about enforcing regulations with the blessing of federal administrations in the last several years with a continuously revised set of rules known as the New Source Performance Standards.
The 2012 version of the NSPS requires that pneumatic controllers at oil and gas production facilities use low-bleed controllers, meaning that gas bleeds from the equipment at less than six standard cubic feet per hour (6 SCFH). The EPA is perpetually in the process of implementing even tighter controls.
Producers can expect the EPA's next enforced amendments to the NSPS to require all producers to have technology in service to eliminate the atmospheric expulsion of these gases. Combined with fees associated with the handling of greenhouse gases, citations, current service costs and lost profit, gas recovery is a highly sought technology in the oil and gas industry.
Most approaches to recovery of production gases merely focus on using better valves, all of which continue to allow a slow bleed of greenhouse emissions, from 100 to 200 mcf/year in practice. Moreover, any approaches that capture gases still require an operator to manually control the system. The oil industry needs to be able to more efficiently handle production gases so they can be eliminated and also recovered for commercial use.